Around 6PM today, I decided to check out the old PSN and found a variety of goodies that I didn't know about including Wildarms 2 and the newest variation on the Breakout concept, Shatter. These kind of games have been around forever but still seem to be popular in bars. At the old bar I used to frequent, there was always someone on the Arkanoid machine pumping quarters in over and over until he staggered out the doors broke. The games are good on the fundamental level but adding anything to them has been nearly trivial.
Breakout was the original version that stemmed the dozens of clones, and for good reason. This game was essentially one player Pong and got progressively more difficult as time went by. Before this, if you wanted to play Pong by yourself, you'd either completely stomp the nonexistent player two or learn to play with your feet and play with yourself in ways no one really wants to think about. It was a good game, you just chip away at the wall until it's gone and then you get to do the same with a slightly stronger wall.
Arkanoid was probably the most successful Breakout clone to come out to date. It brought a few neat little things like power ups and decorativly placed wallpanels to spruce things up. It also brought upon us the concept of enemies and bosses in this style of game where they really serve no real purpose other than annoyance. The only way you could really die in Arkanoid was if you miss your ball, so the enemies were distracting and they also got in the way. We've all been there with only one block left and the ball refusing to go to it and more than once I've had enemies spawn in the way of what would have been the successful shot. Interestingly enough, it also added Doh as the end boss who was a large Moai head almost out of the blue. The thing that got me is that the Moai has always been one of Konami's trademark devices for their arcade game, yet Taito either neglected to play their competition's games or just didn't care. Anyways, Arkanoid was a good game apart from the unneccesary enemies.
This brings us to Shatter, although I'm sure there are other Breakout clones I could ramble on about. Shatter flips the whole concept of of the subgenre on it's knees and just does everything a little better than it's predecessors. As a modern game in an era of realism, the developers brought in the physics and gravity of these more complicated games and threw them into what was once a cutting edge game. As you throw out your ball or balls, you can impact the gravity in the arena by sucking everything towards you or blowing it away. This fixes the "last panel" situation of all it's peers in a way that we should have thought of years ago. As you destroy panels, you collect tiny "S"s that slowly power your paddle up to the point where if you should wish, you can either blast the bricks or enemies with a hail of lasers or use it to power a shield to block any stray panels coming to knock you off the rails. The game switches perspective level to level going from horizontal to vertical to an almost tubular fashion akin to Gyruss. At the end of each episode, you "fight" a boss who will try andmake you miss your ball while you shoot for it's weak point. I find this to be a bit more satisfying than the Arkanoid approach where the enemy just floats around up top as more of an obstacle than a danger. There's more I could probably talk about in this game, but I honestly haven't played enough to say whether it's a watershed moment in arcade minded games or if it's just a nice experience.
Around 6PM today, I decided to check out the old PSN and found a variety of goodies that I didn't know about including Wildarms 2 and the newest variation on the Breakout concept, Shatter. These kind of games have been around forever but still seem to be popular in bars. At the old bar I used to frequent, there was always someone on the Arkanoid machine pumping quarters in over and over until he staggered out the doors broke. The games are good on the fundamental level but adding anything to them has been nearly trivial.
Breakout was the original version that stemmed the dozens of clones, and for good reason. This game was essentially one player Pong and got progressively more difficult as time went by. Before this, if you wanted to play Pong by yourself, you'd either completely stomp the nonexistent player two or learn to play with your feet and play with yourself in ways no one really wants to think about. It was a good game, you just chip away at the wall until it's gone and then you get to do the same with a slightly stronger wall.
Arkanoid was probably the most successful Breakout clone to come out to date. It brought a few neat little things like power ups and decorativly placed wallpanels to spruce things up. It also brought upon us the concept of enemies and bosses in this style of game where they really serve no real purpose other than annoyance. The only way you could really die in Arkanoid was if you miss your ball, so the enemies were distracting and they also got in the way. We've all been there with only one block left and the ball refusing to go to it and more than once I've had enemies spawn in the way of what would have been the successful shot. Interestingly enough, it also added Doh as the end boss who was a large Moai head almost out of the blue. The thing that got me is that the Moai has always been one of Konami's trademark devices for their arcade game, yet Taito either neglected to play their competition's games or just didn't care. Anyways, Arkanoid was a good game apart from the unneccesary enemies.
This brings us to Shatter, although I'm sure there are other Breakout clones I could ramble on about. Shatter flips the whole concept of of the subgenre on it's knees and just does everything a little better than it's predecessors. As a modern game in an era of realism, the developers brought in the physics and gravity of these more complicated games and threw them into what was once a cutting edge game. As you throw out your ball or balls, you can impact the gravity in the arena by sucking everything towards you or blowing it away. This fixes the "last panel" situation of all it's peers in a way that we should have thought of years ago. As you destroy panels, you collect tiny "S"s that slowly power your paddle up to the point where if you should wish, you can either blast the bricks or enemies with a hail of lasers or use it to power a shield to block any stray panels coming to knock you off the rails. The game switches perspective level to level going from horizontal to vertical to an almost tubular fashion akin to Gyruss. At the end of each episode, you "fight" a boss who will try andmake you miss your ball while you shoot for it's weak point. I find this to be a bit more satisfying than the Arkanoid approach where the enemy just floats around up top as more of an obstacle than a danger. There's more I could probably talk about in this game, but I honestly haven't played enough to say whether it's a watershed moment in arcade minded games or if it's just a nice experience.
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